Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used by GNU Emacs. Most of the editing functionality built into Emacs is written in Emacs Lisp, with the remainder being written in C (as is the Lisp interpreter itself). Users of Emacs commonly write Emacs Lisp code to customize and extend Emacs.

Emacs Lisp is also commonly referred to as "elisp" or "Elisp". Files containing Emacs Lisp code use the .el filename suffix; when byte-compiled, the same filename prefix is used but with the .elc filename suffix.

Emacs Lisp is a Lisp-2, which means that a single identifier (in Lisp terminology, "symbol") can simultaneously exist as ("be bound to") both a function and a variable.

Always keep parentheses balanced

Scope

By default elisp uses dynamic scope. Since Emacs 24 lexical scope has been added.
To use lexical binding, an Emacs-lisp source file must set a file-variable lexical-binding to t in the file header, e.g., by using a first line like: